Product Description

The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats's idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.

This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #226373 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-19
• Released on: 2002-02-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375707575
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
Though Anne Carson's poetry is shot through with the myths and images of the classical world, that ancient light helps illuminate contemporary situations and concerns. A classics professor at McGill University in Montreal, Carson has arrived in a surprisingly short time as one of Canada's finest poets. More than that, her exquisite, intelligent, highly original poems put her in the first rank of world poets. In The Beauty of the Husband, subtitled A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, she explores her ambiguous feelings toward a difficult but intriguing marriage. Each poem begins with a short quote from John Keats, whose idea that "beauty is truth" is the thread holding together a relationship with a man addicted to lying and philandering. A scoundrel ("He lied when it wasn't even convenient"), the husband is redeemed and forgiven almost everything because of beauty.

For Carson, the truth is "layered and elusive," hidden under the conversations of a thousand nights, nights when the lights were still on at dawn. There is a daring quality to Carson's work, a startling vision and perspective that will not be judged by normal standards. By penetrating to the core of a relationship, Carson stands convention on its head and finds "the light that pain brings." These poems bespeak the brilliance and shade of shape-shifting truth and conjure a freshness of language that shimmers. Somehow it seems fitting that the book itself, as an object to hold and behold, is also beautiful. --Mark Frutkin

From Publishers Weekly
After the Canadian classicist, polymath and MacArthur "genius grant" winner's much-acclaimed verse-novel Autobiography of Red (1997)Aand exactly a year after Men in the Off HoursAcomes a second book-length, mostly-narrative poem: this charming, edgy, insistently intertextual and finally heartbreaking sequence about unlikely courtship, modern marriage, divorce and "primordial eros and strife." The 29 short chapters Carson calls "Tangos" imagine and analyze, in jaggedly memorable verse, the ill-starred romance between the narrator and her charismatic, needy and unfaithful husband, who writes her romantic letters in her teenage years, introduces her to his tragic friend Ray, cheats on her with women named Merced and Dolor, takes her on a tour of the Peloponnese and begs her to reverse her decision to leave him. The plot emerges through Carson's meditative, elusive fragments, mysteriously isolated couplets, excerpts from versified conversations and letters, interior monologues and (as Carson's readers have come to expect) digressions on matters of classical scholarship. This kind of thing is imitated badly and often by others, but Carson's phraseology within poems remains her own: "Rotate the husband and expose a hidden side," she urges early on; later, "words// are a strange docile wheat are they not, they bend/ to the ground." And if some of Carson's devotees seek just such cryptic moments, others will want, and get, more direct shows of emotion: "Proust/ used to weep over days gone by," she asks the reader, "do you?" (Feb.) Forecast: Carson was the subject of a New York Times Magazine feature this yearAshe is one of the very few poets writing now to cross over into trade-like sales. The wave of publicity may have crested, but this book should be well reviewed, and name recognition should kick in if the book is displayed along with current fiction, which the subtitle obviously encourages.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A professor of classics at McGill University and the author of Autobiography of Red, a National Book Critics Circle nominee, Carson has rapidly become one of North America's most acclaimed academic poets. But even though she spangles her work with the costume jewelry of literary and historical allusion, challenging the reader with obscure, referential puzzles, she also evinces a rare grasp of emotional chemistry. This "fictional essay" on marriage and adulteryDreally an impressionistic poetic meditationDcuts more truly, more deeply than any plain-spoken confessional monolog, dramatizing inner and outer conflict with a precise, knowing wit. The husband holds "Yes and No together with one hand/ while parrying the words of wife." The wife marvels "at her husband's ability to place the world within brackets." Sensibilities unravel and reassemble as contradictions beget tautologies: "If I could kill you I would then have to make another exactly like you./ Why./ To tell it to." Rooted in a literary consciousness at once Romantic and ironic, this is as fresh and compelling a poetic treatment of a familiar subject as one is likely to find in any century.DFred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Love Hurts
Anne Carson has written a beautiful book of poems/tangoes that somehow tell the story of a marriage without actually telling a story. We have fully realized moments, conversations (Carson writes amazing poetic conversations, here and in her other works), events -- without all the connections in between. And yet these moments are woven together, internally and from one tango to the next, with language used as the steps of a dance, providing motifs and figures that carry the reader from one page to the next. Dance, games, rules, war, the rules of war, love, beauty, truth, lies and betrayal -- all of these themes run in and out of the complicated pattern of steps. The technique always serves the lyric, however, and we never lose sight of the feelings Carson wishes to evoke. You feel the separate pains of each betrayal (her betrayal of her mother, the not-yet-husband's failure to appear for their wedding, his first infidelity, each subsequent lie), but despite the pain there is no bitterness in this book -- in fact, Carson's final advice is to "hold beauty." Just as you cannot tell the tale of the lover without telling the tale of the beloved (as the final poem ironically suggests), so, perhaps, you cannot have love, beauty and truth without their opposites. Carson, plainly, is on the side of beauty.

VERY STRONG BOOK BY A MAJOR POET IN ENGLISH
I disagree with the naysayers.....I just heard Ms. Carson read some of these poems and they are powerful and emotional. These poems are very different from GLASS, IRONY AND GOD or AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN RED but she is just increasing her range. I am amazed at how wide she is able to cast her net, her economy of language, her wide range of references in history, literature, the classics, pop culture. I think when you see her read (and I think her poetry is still great if one doesn't hear her read) her wry humour really clicks....it is amazing how much emotion she is able to convey through her wit....I think she is one of the most unique and refreshing voices in literature today. She is a very exciting poet.

An Unique Talent
Anne Carson's poetry reflects an unusual intelligence. Her coruscating language combined with a sensitive nature make for a truly unusual book of poetry.